Special thanks to Alex, who left some comments on my first video about the unit I have and filled in a lot of blanks about the unreleased Intel Chatpad, even volunteering his own complete unit to be put through its paces here! The video was supposed to be a quick run through, but my useless Rode mics failed me yet again, depositing random drips of static all over the sound. 2.4ghz wireless mics suck! So then I had to refilm the entire thing, which was fine because it allowed me to create a special Chatpad Jam, which I had a bit too much fun with. I redid the video with narration and shaved 20 minutes off the runtime, so I’m hoping it’ll do okay despite being released on a Monday rather than Sunday. I would have released it today, but Premiere, as it is wont to do, got pissy about rendering. For some reason known only to Adobe engineers, it decided, despite having successfully rendered two drafts of the very same video, that it would not render with the first 30 seconds of audio unmuted. If I did the render with just that first 30 seconds, it worked just fine. But beyond the first minute, it mysteriously blanked the intro audio. Premiere always invents something like that whenever I’m trying to hit a self-imposed deadline. My ‘fix’ was to use OBS studio to capture the perfectly fine audio track (played off the Premiere timeline, no less), and then put the captured audio in place of the original. And then it worked. Adobe! What the hell, man!
Anyway..
As promised in the video, here are some photos I took of the Chatpad’s motherboard. Yeah, kind of funny seeing an Intel product without apparently a single Intel chip inside. I guess Intel just wanted to slap their name on this Samsung Solar System S1 or something. I’d love to recreate the board, but honestly without the base station update software, which probably doesn’t exist anymore, it’s pointless. And it’s not like it would likely work anyway since the few services it was designed to work with are mostly dead. Anyway, if anyone wants to tackle this project please feel free and let me know how you make out. This one is totally over my head. 🙂
That said, maybe I will look into adding a Raspberry Pi or something to my empty case.. might as well make it do something useful, right?